Share This Post

The latest installment in Michael Bay’s Transformer saga arrives later this year, and the film’s producer has opened up about how it fits with the previous three installments.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura opened up in an interview with The Hollywood News about what explosion fans can expect from Transformers: Age of Extinction, and he provided some new details about which components from the first three films will carry over — and which ones will not.

It sounds like the destruction of Chicago, which occurred in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, will play a big part in Extinction; but don’t expect many references to previous characters such as Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky or Josh Duhamel’s Capt. William Lennox. The new cast is wholly fresh, and Bonaventura said they know nothing of the old gang.

Here’s an excerpt:

“It’s definitely not a reboot. It’s an interesting question about what you should call it. On a certain level it’s a continuation of the previous stories, in the fact that it acknowledges what has transpired before it. It acknowledges in the last movie, the destruction of Chicago, it’s actually something that carries through the sort of emotional repercussions of that, not unlike 9/11 has emotional repercussions in the real world. In a fantasy world there are repercussions to what occurred.

That plays into the movie, moving forwards with a totally different human cast, who doesn’t know anything about the other humans, it’s not a reboot, but a continuation, yet you’re continuing with a new cast and group of characters. It was a big decision to do that. We miss our friends that we did the first three with, and they were great, and they probably could’ve done more. But the advantage of doing it this way is that it feels almost like a first movie. It’s a very different dynamic than I’ve seen in a movie, I’m very curious. I guess Star Wars did that a little bit, but not so close together, the way we’re doing it.”

Considering how far off the rails this franchise had gotten by the time Dark of the Moon rolled around in 2011, not to mention LaBeouf’s positively epic implosion, it makes sense they’d want to jazz up the concept with a new cast. Here’s hoping Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz and Jack Reynor are up to the task.

The sequel opens June 27, 2014. Do you think Extinction can recapture the Transformers magic?